8 Ways to Get More Kids to Attend Your Vacation Bible School

For most churches Vacation Bible School is the largest outreach of the year. To make yours as effective as possible use these strategies to get the word out and get more kids attending your Vacation Bible School. 1. Cross promote. Do you have a daycare or after care program? Make sure they know about your Vacation Bible School. If you have other events going on at the church, pass out flyers. 2. Announce it at church and in your newsletters multiple times. This may seem obvious but if your church has visitors or a lot going on, visitors and members will miss information about your VBS 3. Post it on Facebook and encourage members to pass it on. If your church as a Facebook page post it there. If they don't post it on your personal page. You want to create several announcements. One might be a general announcement, the second one about a special activity and the third about sports. The reason for having multiple announcements is that not all of your friends are going to see each announcement so if you craft three you will catch a lot more people. Ask church members to share the post. This expands your reach exponentially. If your church has 100 friends the post can be seen by 100 people plus friends who visit your members pages. If just 10 of your members repost and they have 100 people the message is now seen by 1,000 people. If you would like to set up a Facebook page we've put instructions on our Growing Churches site. 4. Put up posters around church and in the community. 5. Create flyers and have members pass them out in their neighborhoods. Encourage members to knock on doors and tell people about your Vacation Bible School. It is far more effective than just leaving a flyer. 6. Print up some business cards with info on your VBS and ask members to hand them out to people who might be interested. 7. If your church has claimed their Google Places page post info about Vacation Bible School. Be sure to use the term Vacation Bible School as well as VBS. There were 518,000 people who searched for VBS and Vacation Bible School last month. Be sure to also include the name of the literature you are using on your Places page. 8. Put ads in the local paper and community papers. If you do these things you will have plenty of visitors for your Vacation Bible School.